Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: This article seeks to explore questions concerning participation, collaboration, voices, visions and multi-modal representations in the image-making process. It is a retrospective self-reflection on two audio-visual projects, ‘Nila Illam’ and ‘The Electric Oriental Journey’, conducted by myself in India respectively in 2006 and 2009. In this piece I discuss different ways of crafting audio-visual projects in relation to the film-subject and film-viewer. Thinking of image-making as a triangular rather than dual process between actors (that is, maker-subject-viewer) and of the image-maker as the mediator of such process will be the cornerstone of my analysis. I demonstrate that participatory and collaborative films are sometimes impossible to be realised in their theoretical and methodological intent if they are simultaneously understood in relation to such triangular relationship of image-making, and within the conventionally dual tradition of documentary and ethnographic film practices (maker-subject or maker-viewer). In contrast to that, I argue that ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ audio-visual projects may not only be successfully realised as films but also allow visual/media anthropologists to concurrently explore their relationship with the film-subject (and/or informant) and film-viewer (and/or reader), on condition that we rethink such kinds of projects in relation to contemporary debates about multi-modal representations.
Source: Anthrovision
Author: Giulia Battaglia
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W981216982